Decolonizing Language Teachers’ Teaching Practices through a Postmethod Pedagogy (original) (raw)
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In this autoethnography, I set out to reimagine English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher education by discussing three pedagogical projects (two murals and an iterative performance) carried out with pre-service student teachers of the Foreign Languages Program at Universidad del Valle (Colombia). As part of a bigger political-pedagogical project, I seek to challenge the written academic text as the highest form of cognitive achievement; the linguistic bias/verbocentrism in communication; and the teacher as the possessor/conveyor of the episteme and techne in the language classroom. The projects follow a Critical Action Research design. They articulate a double-lensed framework examining neoliberalism and mobilizing an anticolonial participatory politics approach. Findings point that murals, as multimodal symbolic public texts, challenge the primacy of the written argumentative essay, mobilize hypotheses about reading away from reading as a skill, open the concept of dialogue, and enable teachers to become real learners. The iterative performance interrogates identity and gender politics. These projects recast foreign language teacher education away from anthropocentric views, undermining the institutions and cultural production practices that constitute the field: language, communication, reading/writing, and text, advancing ethics based on coexistence and mutuality to fight off neoliberalism as well as new forms of colonization.
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This article looks at the recent Brazilian public educational policies and the attempt to naturalize the ideology of dominant groups that are opposed to the legitimization of the epistemological diversity of marginalized groups and/or opponents of their beliefs. Based on the Freirean approach and decolonial theories (CASTRO-GÓMEZ; GROSFOGUEL, 2007; LANDER, 2005; MIGNOLO, 2009; MORENO, 2005; SOUSA SANTOS, 2010), I discuss the relationships of submission, subordination, and exclusion promoted by the recent educational policies in Brazil. Furthermore, I seek to problematize the role of education to develop critique and the construction of embodied knowledge, i.e. knowledge built by bodies that have different political, cultural, social, linguistic, racial and gender identities. I conclude by emphasizing the importance of rethinking the role of English in our contemporary society as well as the ethos of teacher education and the teaching of English itself as a political task which promotes inquiry, critical thinking, and respect to the epistemological diversity. RESUMO Este trabalho tem como objetivo refletir sobre as recentes políticas públicas educacionais brasileiras e a tentativa de naturalização da ideologia dos grupos dominantes, em detrimento à legitimação da pluralidade epistemológica de grupos marginalizados e/ou contrários a tal pensamento uniformizador. A partir de uma perspectiva freiriana e passando pelas teorias de decolonialidade (CASTRO-GÓMEZ; GROSFOGUEL, 2007; LANDER, 2005; MIGNOLO, 2009; MORENO, 2005; SOUSA SANTOS, 2010), discuto as relações de submissão, subordinação e exclusão promovidas pelas políticas educacionais recentes. Em seguida, busco problematizar o papel da educação para o desenvolvimento da criticidade e da construção do conhecimento corporificado, isto é, construído a partir de corpos atravessados por diferentes identidades culturais, sociais, linguísticas, de raça e de gênero. Concluo, ressaltando a importância de se repensar o papel da língua inglesa na sociedade atual e o caráter fundamental da formação de professores e do ensino do idioma como uma tarefa política que desenvolva o questionamento, o pensamento crítico e o respeito à diversidade epistemológica. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Decolonialidade; Políticas educacionais; Formação de professores; Conhecimento corporificado; Ensino de línguas.